It is a recent trend in industries, especially in the automobile industry, for instance, to use resin parts which are lightweight and superior in designing flexibility. However, the application of comparatively inexpensive PP or PE resin to exterior panels of vehicles, for instance, entails a problem that the adhesion of paint films to the surfaces of resin panels is not so good and the paint films are likely to peel off the surfaces. Treatment of surfaces with plasma has been known as a means for solving the above-mentioned problem. In plasma treatment, the surfaces of PP or PE resin parts are subjected to corona, or glow discharge treatment or to radio or microwave discharge treatment to oxidize (introduction of polar groups) or to etch (improvement of the anchoring effect) the surfaces.
On the other hand, in plasma treatment, it is necessary to evacuate or to reduce the pressure of the reaction chamber in order to enhance the effect of treatment (to extend the life of plasma). Accordingly, at the present a batch process is employed in most cases for plasma treatment.
In applying the batch system of plasma treatment process to the production of automotive parts, namely, to a mass production process, it is required that the reaction chamber is rapidly evacuated in a short period of time and the number of parts which can be subjected to plasma treatment in one batch cycle is increased. However, the conventional apparatus for plasma treatment has a problem that the parts are plasma-treated differently among the parts as well as within each part depending on the disposition of the parts in the reaction chamber, since automotive parts are large and complicated in configuration.